RPS Agenda Preview: Dec 5, 2022

Happy Friday, Board Watchers!  Richmond Public Schools published their agenda for Monday’s board meeting and…. it’s a doozy. 

The agenda covers a little bit of everything, but I won’t be boring you with things like janitor contracts. Instead, I’ve put together a list of Board discussion items that are most consequential, or most likely to start trouble on the Armstrong High School stage. I’ve assigned each item below a 🌶 score, 1-3. 

This post is as long as the meeting is likely to be - so use this guide to skip ahead to the subject(s) that most interest you:

  • Overall Agenda Length

  • Curriculum Taskforce

  • Construction Updates

  • Collective Bargaining

  • Organizational Chart

  • Budget Priorities for FY 23-24

  • School Calendar for 23-34

Overall Agenda Length 

Imagine meeting agendas are like grocery lists. Mom (Chairwoman) and Dad (Superintendent) sit down together at the kitchen table and draft up a list (this is the agenda-setting meeting every Wednesday-before-a-Board-meeting). 

  • There are always the staples, like milk and eggs. (These are routine/ceremonial agenda items like the pledge of allegiance, introducing student representatives, or receiving public comment.)

  • They talk about things they NEED. (The boring, time-sensitive business that is necessary to keep the lights on and the gears turning in a 22k student school district.)

  • They talk about things they WANT. (Board priorities, and Administrative business the Board should begin considering for later decision making.)

  • And all the while the kids are tugging at their sleeves, begging for fruit snacks and soda to make the list. (These are Board colleagues’ interests. They’re important, too, but it would make little difference if we talk about them in our only December meeting, or some other time in the coming months.)

  • If your list is long, your time in the store will be, too. If you’re on a tight schedule - like the Board’s 4-hour meeting limit - you’ve got to prioritize.  

  • If you’re a careful consumer - you also need to leave time to turn over each package, read all the ingredients, and check the calorie count. (Our Board calls this “doing their due diligence.” Every item gets careful, exhaustive, exhausting scrutiny.)

To give you an idea of what a responsible agenda should look like: CGCS (our Board’s mentor) describes a well-functioning Board’s agenda as having “no more than 5” discussion items. A HIGH-ACHIEVING Board’s agenda  has “no more than 3.” (Pg 5) Other districts pull this off by making use of their consent agenda, and making decisions in a timely manner so they don’t end up revisiting the same topics over and over and over again.

Last meeting, our Board got through 10 discussion items by 11PM. They deferred the rest.

This agenda? It has 19 Board discussion items. Nineteen! Forget the ceremonial stuff - if the Board used all 4 hours JUST on governing business, they’d need to churn through each topic in less than 12 minutes. (Twelve minutes is like… two Jonathan Young sentences.)

This agenda sets the whole Board up for another failed 10PM cut-off time.

It disrespects many RPS staff and community partners, who patiently wait for their turn at the podium to share a presentation, or simply have to be on-hand to answer Board questions. (Sometimes these guests wait well into the night.)

But this agenda illustrates something else: an undisciplined Chairwoman, who came to the agenda-planning meeting incapable of prioritizing critical discussion items, and/or unwilling to “maintain order” amongst her colleagues. (“No fruit snacks this time kids, we only have time to grab the essentials!”) It’s fine that they request agenda items, but it’s her job to communicate and negotiate an agenda that is both reasonable and manageable in one 4-hour meeting. 

We’re bound to see a now-familiar pattern play out:

  • Reps Burke and Page enforce a 10PM cutoff

  • Everyone whose priorities get deferred will grumble. 

  • The Chairwoman will get frustrated (because she can’t make everyone happy), embarrassed (because her colleagues have drawn attention to a weakness in her leadership skills), and/or defensive (because she will not take responsibility, and will instead blame her colleagues for not “policing themselves” and requesting so many agenda items.)

Expect mild fireworks... 🌶

Curriculum Taskforce

The pandemic era has made teaching - an already under-paid and demanding job - damn near impossible. Students are at least half a grade behind academically, probably more so emotionally, and maintaining their physical health has required one resource teachers were already starved of: time. Teachers are covering more classes, taking shifts as lunch monitors, mediating more student disputes… Basically doing everything but lesson planning during their contracted hours.

In RPS, the lost planning period is especially concerning because teachers are also working with new-and-new-ish curricula that the district adopted over the last few years. These curricula are not aligned to the Virginia SOLs (no curricula is) and adapting it is frustrating and time-consuming. 

The Vice Chair tried to remedy this with a series of aggressive curriculum reform motions in August and September - all of which failed. In October, she proposed a more moderate plan: let’s set up a teacher-taskforce to assess each curricula, and see which we need to throw out, which we need to build upon, and which (if any) are working just fine. A sensible “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” approach that her colleagues endorsed.

The trouble here comes down to time and trust. 

TIME: With only 14 days to assemble the taskforce, the administration didn’t have time to widely promote the project, or recruit participants via an “application and review” process. Instead, the taskforce was largely filled out by school administrators’ recommendations

TRUST: Members of the Board believe this was done intentionally to guarantee an admin-friendly taskforce who will recommend no-or-little change.

TIME: The Vice Chair’s motion required the taskforce to complete their work and submit their recommendations by this Monday’s meeting. (2 months from the date of the motion, 1.5 months from the day the taskforce was fully assembled.)

TRUST: There’s no way this rushed job produces the thorough analysis, or detailed report that this School Board demands before making really any governing decision. This is most often the case when the resulting recommendation does not confirm the Board’s own bias.

If the recommendation validates the Vice-Chair’s initial “throw out our curricula and start over” position -  expect a fiery “I told you so” that disparages her doubting Board colleagues and the Superintendent she believes to be both corrupt and inept. 🌶

If the recommendations favor the Superintendent’s belief that the current “rigorous” curriculum is worth the extra work for teachers and his academic department - expect an attack on the not-transparent-enough process, which casts doubt on any/all of the taskforce’s conclusions. 🌶🌶🌶 (Update: Based on the presentation, it looks like this is the path we’re headed down. I also expect a comment or two about missing the December deadline on VDOE-sign-off and budget impact report.)

Construction Updates

The new George Wythe is chugging right along (they’re in phase 3 of planning!) - Last meeting’s update got deferred though, so we’ve got some catch-up to play. There are some questions about providing sufficient parking, and space for exceptional education, but nothing particularly controversial.

Fox, though, is another matter. The 2nd District Rep, Mariah White, appears to believe the elementary school will only be rebuilt if she’s constantly badgering the superintendent, construction manager Dana Fox, or whoever else delivers the meeting updates. She and others have accused them of withholding or intentionally misrepresenting relevant information about…

  • The cause of the fire. RFD report was inconclusive, and heavily redacted.

  • The insurance pay-out. This has always been TBD, but is causing concern now because the insurance is fighting to cover as little of the rebuild-costs as possible. (You know, like insurance companies do.)

  • The design firm. Contracted by “emergency procurement” - the Board has to trust that the superintendent found the best firm, by honest means, at a responsible price point, which is a tall order for this Board.

Now, after the Board agreed to leave the burned school roofless for another 35 weeks, the community is mad. I expect we’ll see Ms. White blame the superintendent for not being more ________ (honest? aggressive? informative?) about the risks associated with the decision to forgo a temporary roof. Heads they win, tails he loses. I’m going to leave room for a pile-on from other Board members with some “buyers remorse” and give this 🌶🌶.

UPDATE: the Fox presentation is up, including details about how excessive moisture on the (exposed) 2nd floor is causing the plaster to fall away from the walls. Yikes.

Collective Bargaining

Exactly a year ago, Richmond Public Schools made history by becoming the first school district in the state to pass collective bargaining. RPS has since negotiated with Richmond Education Association (REA) on compensation and clearly defining/valuing duties that fall outside the scope of educators’  contracts. Monday night, we’ll get another update.

Collective bargaining passed in an 8-1 vote, so this should be a pretty tame/quick discussion. But teachers have already expressed frustration with the slow pace of negotiations and their limited scope. If there’s any reason (or rumor) to believe the administration is intentionally stalling the process, I’m sure we’ll get a few barbs. 0-🌶  

Organizational Chart

This is a discussion of district staff, how central office teams are organized, and who they report to. It’s listed under “Board Business” - which is absolutely a problem.

District staffing - like all administrative business in the school district - is the job of the superintendent. Everyone in the district works for him. It’s his job to know each job description, which departments are at-or-over-capacity, and how to organize each team to guarantee a successful workflow. 

The only possible reason that “Organizational Chart” is a Board discussion item is because the Board wants to “influence” (impose) their staffing and management preferences on the superintendent. This is Board overreach. The Board Majority knows this - but it has not stopped them. They’ve spent the last year finding creative ways to undermine the superintendent’s authority:

  • In February of this year, the RTD exposed the Board-Majority’s plan to fire some district employees by simply refusing to fund their jobs anymore. (Public pressure thwarted this plan.)

  • Four weeks later, they found another work-around: we can keep your cabinet small by abusing our veto power (POLICY 7-2.7) to kill your plan to hire a Chief Wellness Officer. The Vice-Chair was coy at the time, suggesting concerns with candidate qualifications. But the Chairwoman is far more direct. 

  • In September, the Chairwoman told her colleagues that she would continue to reject new cabinet hires like the Chief Wellness Officer, explaining her preference to shuffle-the-deck-chairs. “I will not support filling a CWO position now or in the near future.” She wants those funds used to hire more counselors, coaches, and academic specialists. (FWIW, we have funds for those positions already. Those jobs remain vacant because we do not have enough people applying for them.) 

These shenanigans have severely damaged the Board’s reputation. The public backlash has been loud, visible, and persistent. There have been repeated calls for Board members to resign, and open discussions about firing-Board-members-by-recall. 

So why even add this discussion to the agenda at all? For one: they’re still not willing to honor the Superintendent’s contracted authority… but they also need to save face. Rejecting more cabinet candidates the superintendent brings forward would be extremely unpopular - especially now that the public knows how concerned the VDOE is about this staff-starved district. Instead, this “discussion” - this third way - is likely their attempt to “ask the superintendent nicely” to yield his contractually-protected power over district staffing.

Their decision to have this conversation now also leads me to believe some rumors I’ve been hearing: that the superintendent has found candidates to fill both the vacant COO and CWO positions.

I don’t know if the superintendent will push back on this overreach, or how hard. 

I don’t know if the Board Minority will hold their colleagues to the letter or the spirit of their limited elected authority. 

But I do know that this overreach has had serious consequences. Running the district with pseudo-superintendents (namely, the Chairwoman and Vice-Chair) has made work in the district untenable for many senior members of the RPS staff - like the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Academic Officer, and several directors - who have all resigned in recent months. There ought to be a separation of powers - which is probably why VA lawmakers specifically prevent School Board members from simultaneously serving as their own district’s superintendent.

This is a year-long game of chicken, and everyone is losing. Even if the conversation is tame, the blow to morale will not be. 🌶🌶🌶

Budget Priorities for FY 23-24

To paraphrase the Vice Chair: the district’s budget is easily the most important work of our elected School Board. Yet this is the 15th discussion item, tacked onto this agenda as though it’s an afterthought. Either this is a simple “wishlist” exercise that should-have-been-an-email, or they should have set up an entire separate meeting to unify behind a few key priorities.  

I commend them for getting an early start, though. They were months late delivering the FY 22-23 budget - which proved to be quite the battle. (It also doesn’t appear that they ever really finalized it - since they are continually petitioning one-another to fund new priorities like school renamings, in-house legal counsel, and brand new curricula.) 

No chilis for now. I suspect they’ll save their fire for January, when the admin presents their first draft of the FY 23-34 budget, and the city deadline looms. 

To get a sense of this Board’s varied funding priorities, check out last week’s blog post.

School Calendar for 23-34 

Over the last two months’ meetings, the administration has presented hours of academic data and recommendations from national experts. Covid (and virtual learning) set our students more than half a grade behind academically. If we’re going to help our students catch-up and learn more, then they need more time to learn.

The district is already creating solutions school-by-school for things like Saturday academies, or extending the school day to add a “5th period” just for tutoring or enrichment opportunities.

But the elephant in the room is year round school. (Or what Kamras recently called a “200 instructional-day calendar.”) Several Board members voiced support for the idea in the last meeting. (Jonathan Young, Liz Doerr, and I think Cheryl Burke?) Many teachers, though, oppose the idea. With teachers in short-supply in RPS (and across the country), we’ll have to see if the Board has the appetite to make this kind of controversial change. 

I expect public comment to get spicy (🌶🌶), but that the teacher (community?) backlash will grow over the coming weeks/months as the Board nears adopting any official calendar.

That’s all I’ve got for you today! If you want more RPS/local government reading, check out John Baliles’ latest 5x5. He’s got some interesting Arthur Ashe Center updates and analysis. You can also find clips from attorney Tom Wolf’s presentation to the Board last week, here.

Becca DuVal